One man's quest to exercise enough so that he can eat all of the good things that exist in the world

Menu

Exercise success, blogging fail

Day four and I failed. I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to keep up with the blogging, but I had hoped that I would make it a bit further into January than that. So it is with a hung head that I am typing this, my fourth Janathon blog entry on the fifth day of January.

On the plus side, though, you all get a double dose of exercise updates today. Hooray!

Day four saw me back in the pool for a second dose of Total Immersion drills. Progressing on from the first day of drilling on my back, the next set of drills saw me practicing the same technique but on my side. The aim is to find the sweet spot, the angle on your side where you have the same degree of balance that you have on your back. This took a little bit of practice but I soon found the spot on both my left and right sides where I felt comfortable. This allowed me to move on to the next drill, alternating between the two sides whilst keeping my head locked in the same position, facing up out of the water.

This turned out to be a really good session and I felt pretty comfortable with these drills. It helped that techniques such as pressing down on your lungs whilst you’re moving (in order to lift your hips up) were things that I had discovered on sites such as The Water Blogged Triathlete (see their floating drill, for example) and had some experience of.

So that was yesterday, what about today?

Today was a running day, and I haven’t been able to say that since sometime in mid October. The distance wasn’t great (I’ve just had to map a slightly shorter version of one of my old routes on Daily Mile) but the pace was pretty good. I will need to do a lot more work on my endurance to get back to the point where I can keep that pace up over a longer distance but it felt good to be out running again.

I haven’t had one of these for a while

Afterwards my legs hurt a little up the outsides of the quads but they recovered pretty quickly. With more practice and a few more runs under my belt I hope that the previous running form will return reasonably quickly. It will be interesting to see where I have got back to, running-wise, by the end of Janathon.